Tania King is chief legal officer for a company with more employees than Newport Beach has residents.
Irvine-based Alorica Inc. employs 100,000 people, providing call services for large corporations.
“I have an obligation to 100,000 people in some shape or form,” she said in an interview at her office near John Wayne Airport. She pointed out the obvious: She has a team, so “it’s not all on me.”
It might sound overwhelming, but King is a lawyer accustomed to dealing with big numbers and handling roles beyond the typical in-house counsel post.
She was previously chief legal officer and chief strategy officer at Advantage Solutions, an Irvine-based company that generated $2.1 billion in annual sales and employed 47,000 in 2016.
King is beginning to make her mark at Alorica, which she joined a year ago as chief legal and compliance officer.
Alorica naturally outsources legal work, and on the day of the interview for this story, she was careful not to mention a couple of law firms Alorica is replacing. She praises current firms like Latham & Watkins LLP on the corporate side and Crowell & Moring LLP on the employment side.
“Those two are standouts, for sure,” King said.
Seeking Talent
The company’s revenue has exploded 290% over two years to $2.4 billion in the year ended June 30, a fastest-growing, large private company on the Business Journal’s annual list.
King oversees a 15-member legal team that includes lawyers in Europe, Latin America and Asia. She’s looking to hire lawyers on the vice president level in the areas of contracts and compliance.
King said she’s working more than 60 hours a week, a pace she envisions slowing as she gets her team into place.
“The talent in place two and half years ago is not the talent to manage today’s needs and the future growth of this organization,” she said.
In January, she also took on the role of chief employee experience officer, known at most companies as human resources. About 70% of Alorica’s business comes from Fortune 500 companies that outsource customer services. She said Alorica prefers “customer experience” centers over call centers.
“It’s so much more than” a call center. “Once you really sit with an agent and understand what they’re doing on behalf of our clients, it’s an experience we are creating every day to support our clients’ brands.”
The majority of employees are in North America, followed by the Philippines, Latin America and Europe.
About one-tenth of a percent of Alorica’s large number of employees work at its Irvine headquarters; the company has only two centers elsewhere in California. It’s not expanding in California because of the increasing minimum wage and its being an “employee-friendly state that makes it very difficult to do business,” she said.
Tech Starter
King, who has degrees from the University of California-Santa Barbara and University of Oxford, earned her juris doctor from Santa Clara University with the idea of focusing on Silicon Valley, where she worked in-house at a technology firm in the pre-dotcom boom days. She moved to Orange County to work at Microsoft solutions provider QuickStart Technology.
She joined Advantage Solutions in 2001. It had recently “consolidated 24 separate companies to overnight become a $500 million company.” She stayed for 15 years, overseeing four private equity transactions and 50 acquisitions.
“I don’t know if anyone is ever an expert in M&A because it’s so ever-changing,” she said, “but I got a wealth of experience.”
She was the Business Journal’s General Counsel Award winner in the private company category in 2012.
Why did she jump ship when Alorica founder Andy Lee invited her to join his company?
“I saw his vision for the future in this space and what this industry is going to look like in the next five to seven years,” King said. “He’s investing in talent. He’s innovative. He’s preserved the entrepreneurial spirit at Alorica while maintaining a $2.4 billion company. That’s an amazing accomplishment.”
On-Trend
She has to keep on top of issues, including sexual harassment, and social media sites like Glassdoor.com, where the firm has ranked low due to turnover. King, who often wakes at 3 a.m. to handle international conference calls, said she also must be aware of cultural norms in foreign countries, such as when she hears the phrase, “We’ll get to it” in Asia as code for an employee’s unwillingness to do something.
Her ability to expand into roles beyond chief legal officer role leads to questions from other attorneys about how to avoid being typecast as an attorney. She advises in-house lawyers to consider themselves businesspeople first.
“If you’re seen as a solution-oriented strategist, even though you’re a lawyer, then you’ll be tapped to do more. That’s how it migrated for me. I kept being asked to join a strategic steering committee or an international venture committee. It parlayed into more.”
